


Certainty

by Someone_aka_Me



Series: in a world that could've left us hard as metal [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 19:26:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2162295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Someone_aka_Me/pseuds/Someone_aka_Me
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andromeda has spent her whole life being sure. Until now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Certainty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissingMommy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissingMommy/gifts).



She has spent her whole life being sure of things. She doesn't make choices she is not sure about. She deliberates until she is certain.

She is not sure about this.

But the fact is, she doesn't have the time to debate anymore. She has to make a choice, because they found out about him, her family found out about Ted, and they are demanding action. They are demanding that she walk away.

She isn't sure she can.

Ted is something she never imagined. She'd always assumed, as a child, that she would follow the rules, that she would marry who her parents intended. She hadn't expected to like it, but she hadn't expected to have other options, either.

She hadn't expected Ted. She hadn't expected to fall in love so deeply.

He makes her feel… free. Alive. Euphoric and giddy and absolutely real. He grounds her and makes her feel like she's flying all at once. With him, she feels like she can be  _anybody_  instead of trying to fit into her family's preformed mold.

She loves them; they are her  _family_. They will always be her family, Cissa and Bella in particular. Yet she loves him, too. She doesn't want to choose, and yet she knows that she has to. She has to make a choice. If she continues attempting a double life, he will die, that she is sure of. They told her to take care of it or they'd take care of it for her. She knows what that means, and she won't let that happen.

She does not know whether she loves him enough to leave them, but neither does she know whether she loves them enough to let him go.

But the thing is, she is out of time to decide. This is it. Inaction is a decision as much as action is.

Her heart is tugging her in two different directions and so she stops attempting to force it to choose. She takes a deep breath and instead tackles it with her mind, because rationality is the only other option.

Rationally, she knows that her family are the people who have raised her since birth. She knows them as well as she knows herself, and she trusts in them to be a constant. A miserable, self-involved, occasionally sadistic constant, but a constant nonetheless. Ted is more of an uncertainty. She believes that he loves her but she does not know his definition of love or whether it includes forever.

But Ted is good and kind and sweet and he wouldn't cast a dark spell even if it cost him his life, and he lives with a sort of fervid intensity that she absolutely adores. He clings to life absolutely. He is more alive than anyone she has ever met before.

She loves him, truly and completely. She isn't prepared to let him go, because she knows, logically, that  _he_  is the sort of person she wants to be.  _They_ are not. And she knows that the people she spends time with define who she is.

She has to decide for herself who she wants to be.

And when she puts it that way, well, it's no choice at all.


End file.
